~ Ilan Lerman: Dark Fiction

Tag Archives: Edinburgh

Boris started life in the most desperate of circumstances. Stuffed in a bin bag with his brothers and sisters as a new-born kitten and left by the bins at the bottom of a Glasgow tenement garden.

Thanks to the brother of my then work-colleague, whose garden it was, he was rescued, nursed to health and eventually landed on my doorstep, tiny and black and curious. I knew there was something quite special about him from that first day, when he fell asleep under my bed and snored with that wheezy snort he always had.

He lived with me for the best part of five years in two far-too-small flats, but it wasn’t until I moved into the Stockbridge Colonies in Edinburgh with Alexis that he really was able to be his true, happiest self. We had a little garden, and the street was quiet so he was finally able to enjoy and explore the outdoors, even though the flat was still pretty damn small. He sunned himself on the bench in front of our bay window, sat amongst the daffodil leaves and ferns sniffing the air, watching blue tits and robins, hoverflies and bumblebees. He was a pacifist. He never really hunted, preferring to watch the birds flit from the laburnum tree to the bride tree and back again. He occasionally toyed with a beetle or a cranefly in that cute, slightly obsessive way cats have, but seemed to just enjoy following their crazy progress with his huge expressive eyes.

Everyone thinks their cat is the best in the world, or is the most eccentric character and truly the greatest cat by far. That says so much about the special bond that can exist between a human and a cat. It’s a relationship of mutual benefit. Boris was never shy about expressing his opinions. I’ve never met another cat with such a large vocabulary. From the tiniest little half-meows and throaty grunts and snorts, to his multi-syllabic meow-screams, telling you off for not doing what he wanted you to do, thoroughly putting you in your place. I’ve never known a cat to express indignation quite so pointedly as Boris could when you weren’t quite living up to your part of the bargain as human-owner.

He loved his fuss, his food (particular favourites – olives, cheese, tuna and ham) his catnip mouse, scratching post, sunbeams, eating grass (even though it made him sick nearly every time) and most of all, preening his shiny, immaculate midnight-black fur to perfection. He loved to sleep buried under blankets where he would leave an indentation coated in that fur. His hairs would follow us around the country. It wouldn’t be unusual to be 300 miles away and suddenly find a Boris hair in your eyeball.

He would tap you on the arm if he wanted fuss, or if you stopped with the fuss too soon. It wouldn’t be unusual to be lying in bed and have a paw stretch up from below and touch your arm. He would headbutt you, violently rub his cheek on your laptop screen, knock the book you were reading out of the way so you paid him the attention he deserved. He loved having his belly rubbed, would purr like an engine, loved having the bridge of his nose stroked with the tip of a finger, would get the hiccups when he became too excited and the fuss was just too much.

He had an uncanny ability to tell the time. His concept of routine was quite something to behold. He knew when I was coming home, would wake from his afternoon slumber about ten minutes or so before I got in and would be sat on the arm of the sofa waiting for me with a feed me meow. Sometimes we were like E.T. and Elliot. If he was feeling a bit under the weather, so would I. If I was nervous or upset, he would always pick up on it.

Like many cats, he inherited many names. Some cute, some cuddly, some profane, some ridiculous, some whose meaning would take far too long to explain…

He was: Fluffyhead, Fluffmonster, Fuzzyhead, Little Pal, Supercat (because of the way he stretched his front legs straight out past his face when he slept on his stomach). He was: Jobby-ferret, Spunk-badger, Shit-weasel, Captain Dingleberry, Spaghetti-head, Fluffbum, Dude and many many others. But most of all he was my Buddy.

Nearly three months ago we left Edinburgh. Through various miracles we managed to buy a beautiful house surrounded by woodland in a hidden valley, deep in the Ochil Hills. I had hoped it might be a fabulous retirement home for Boris, approaching his 14th birthday.

He enjoyed his time here, while he could: chasing his favourite treats up the long hallway, watching the pheasants and chaffinches from the many large windows, snoozing on the sofa, stretching out in sunbeams on the wood floors, tentatively exploring the garden and a house bigger than he’d ever seen.

He had been losing weight, and starting to go off his food little by little, electing to sleep under the blanket on the sofa more and more. I thought his poor old teeth were giving him trouble so took him for some dental work at the vet. They found something more troubling, and over the last couple of weeks the liver disease ate away at him, taking away the things that made him Boris.

On Friday 2nd September, one day after his 14th birthday, and after the most difficult and heart-breaking decision I’ve ever had to make, the vet came to the house and helped him find some final peace.

I had hoped he would get to experience life here in the new house for much longer. To enjoy the heat of the wood-burner in winter; to explore the bushes and pine trees and fields of ferns. Still, what a way to come from the bottom of a Glasgow garden, dumped ignominiously by some callous bastard to a home where he was loved and cherished and had all the space in the world to be Boris.

We buried him in a small glade, between two vast old pine trees, with a handsome stone cairn to mark his spot. He can sleep peacefully now in the place he began to love.

As winters go, it has been relatively mild yet stormy. Work has dominated my personal landscape for the last four weeks or so and now comes the usual illness-heavy week between Christmas and New Year. It’s at this time of year I always long the most for the sun and wide open spaces away from the city. Particularly due to the near-perpetual darkness and the long Winter yet to come. As Billy Connolly once said…

There are two seasons in Scotland: June and Winter.

Inspiration has dried up somewhat in the latter half of this year. Difficult to put a finger on why, but I’ve written very little, prose or otherwise. So I intend to try two things to change that. The last story I wrote is still in first draft stage (“The Door Behind The Door” – a ghost story set in the Scottish Highlands) and I was quite pleased with I wrote. There are at least two significant places I’d like to send it imminently, so I will put my mind to a redraft and see if that helps to rekindle the creative spark.

Second thing I need to do is buy a new desk and re-boot my writing space. I haven’t been comfortable there for a long time, and unfortunately our little flat yields very few options for alternatives. There’s nothing like a spring clean, even if it isn’t quite spring yet, but in a Scottish winter, spring needs to be a state of mind.

The time has passed now, but I’d intended to blog on the anniversary of the flood last year. The contrast between the river now and then is quite ridiculous. Unfortunately I never managed to take a pic of the river when it was at its height last year, but I would estimate it reached close to twelve feet. Might not sound like a lot, but currently it is trickling lazily over the river-bed rocks at a depth of about one inch. Seems impossible that it could ever be so fast-moving, so dangerous.

It happened on July 7th, a notorious date for many reasons. This year it was the day Andy Murray won Wimbledon and as the river dried up under the constant sun, most of Stockbridge was silent in front of TVs willing on Andy to win that trophy.

The culprit for the flood last year was the unfinished flood wall. A work that’s been in progress for a few years now. The small bridge (Bell’s Bridge) over the Water of Leith has now been re-opened at last and I was struck by the changes to the view. I have a photo taken in 2008 before the work started and one taken the other day.

With sun flattering the scene, the photo is kind to the wall. I like that they have finished the wall with a traditional brick-look, even if I know it’s concrete with massive pile-driven metal foundations inside. Other than that it seems terribly brutal; a monolithic wall. Hopefully some vegetation will eventually cover up the harder-looking parts of the wall and soften its appearance.

The wall is there to do a job, and if it prevents a future flood then I can make my peace with the destruction that’s been done to the river bank. Wildlife is returning and parts of the bank are growing in this hot summer. It will of course take a few years, but I can’t help feel my heart sink when I see the stumps where great trees once grew, and unending grim concrete where once a characterful Victorian wall stood, and for the most part resisted flood many years later. There is no doubt it needed repairing and strengthening, rebuilding in places, but I wonder how much this major construction project needed to happen. Mixed emotions over it. I certainly don’t want to see a scene outside my door again like the one in the photograph at the top of the post.

The sun sets on another year. 2012. Good morning, 2013, what do you have to say for yourself?

Walking home over the river yesterday, the sun was setting and I remarked to myself about it being the last sunset of the year. I have an obsession with sunsets. This then sparked an endless thought process about the way we, as human beings, calibrate time and assign such importance and significance to events. And what better time to think about such things than the biggest marker on the great calibration, New Year’s Day. It’s the massive climax to the calendar year. The big countdown to a singular point in time where everything resets and we begin again.

Perhaps it’s just an effect of growing older, but the significance of the event has faded for me. I guess once you’ve seen forty-odd New Years come and go the excitement dies. Well, maybe not for everyone, but I don’t have the appetite for the madness that comes with a big city Hogmanay any more. If I have any resolution to make, it’s to spend more Hogmanays in the country, in a nice local pub with a roaring fire and a few folk.

With the calibration of time comes the inevitable reflection on what what was achieved or not in the previous year, even though it doesn’t actually matter. Time still goes on. Nobody is sitting and waiting with a score card to mark you on what you accomplished or failed in 2012, but New Year is a moment when we all decide to do embark on new things and make resolutions to achieve more, to do better, etc… when we should be striving for that all year round. We are animals of routine, though, and breaking out of those embedded patterns of behaviour is all but impossible (for me anyway, slavish creature of habit that I am).

2012 was a year of two halves, Jim. First half was filled with inertia over the writing, but I had one of the most relaxing holidays I’ve ever had in the kind of weather you only dream about in this country (the photo above is one of many taken during those glorious two weeks). Second half began with stress over the flooding and the dreadful weather hampered plans for making further getaways, but my writing flourished again, and by the end of the year I managed to finally sell a short story to my favourite magazine. Love as Deep as Bones is due out in the next issue of Black Static and will be a great way to start 2013.

Recalling the events of exactly twelve weeks ago, I discovered some video footage taken by an intrepid wanderer during the height of the floods. This video is of our street when the flood waters were at their peak. I’m so glad our flat, though a ground floor colony flat, was at the higher end of the street.

What the video really brings back is the feel of that morning. The ceaseless rain. The unending drabness of the sky, and the weird silence as everyone just waited for the outcome, or for someone to come and take care of the situation. Everything’s so normal again around here now, it’s mightily surreal watching this video.

Some will argue with that statement, no doubt. Winter and Summer in this country are generally miserable. They have their positive attributes, but Winter is often bitterly cold, windy, wet, and an interminably long and dark period. Summer has a tendency, in Scotland, to be dreich, humid, overcast, and unbearably disappointing.

There is an argument for Spring. It’s hard to beat the bright optimism that rises like sun out of the freezing fog when the first shoots pierce the earth and promise of the coming days. At what other time of year is there such a riot of floral colour and a feeling of emerging from a long sleep?

Autumn, though, is about harvest, and a certain abandon. The light is achingly beautiful. It’s the final heartbreaking days of a perfect holiday, knowing that it’s all soon to be over and the return to cold grey normality (Winter) is inevitable. Autumn is crackling fires and piles of golden leaves kicked in the air. It’s whisky warming your belly after a hard day’s work; picking fat brambles and staining your hands purple with the juices; making stock with the roast chicken you’ve just devoured, to provide the base for soups for the coming months. It’s about pulling on those friendly jumpers and hats and creating your own warmth in the cooling, sinking sunshine.

Today, it was about working at the Stockbridge Market, helping the lovely Alexis sell her gorgeous jewellery to Sunday-happy strollers in the dappled September sunshine. It was about freshly cooked Paella eaten in the open air (yes, that’s it in the pan in the photo). If you live in Edinburgh and enjoy food, then you should absolutely come to the Market and eat the incredible, varied food and buy the all the pretty things.

Autumn has also always been a fruitful time for writing for me, for some reason. I enjoy the feeling of hunkering down in the house when the weather is inclement, positioned in front of the glowing screen, creating universes with the tips of my fingers.

But nothing beats eating outside at this time of year. Freshly baked bread. Roast meats. Apples. Most people spend the summer barbecuing the life out of poor innocent sausages and burgers, to lie in the sweaty humidity and consume them, because that’s what everyone else does. Crisp Autumn days, such as today, when the sun is brighter, lower in the sky and dazzling, and you can smell the frost in the mornings, are days to cook outside with a ridiculous jumper on. Then you can savour the warmth of the food against the chill air and your taste buds come alive.

A knock on the door at 8.30 in the morning woke us up. I stumbled to the door but no-one was there, although I heard further knocking at the neighbour’s doors. Somehow, even though the street was already filling with water and the rain was lashing down, I didn’t register that the Water of Leith had burst its banks at the end of the street and was on its inexorable way towards us. I just thought there was a pretty spectacular puddle on the cobbles.

The image above was taken after the water had started to recede. If I’d been standing in the same spot half an hour earlier, you wouldn’t be seeing any pavement. The street is on a deceptive gradient, sloping up from the far (river) end to where I’m standing taking the photo.

After my brain finally woke up and we realised what was happening, we dashed out and moved the car which was already being surrounded by water. The rain just kept coming and it looked pretty bleak. Sandbags were like gold dust and very slow in coming from the likes of the council who, to be reasonably fair, were rather stretched that morning with flooding happening all over the city (although when the bags did finally come it was already too late). The sight of the river down by Canonmills was terrifying – a relentless rush of muddy water and debris that was only a few inches from the top of the new flood defence wall.

The waters advanced slowly up the street, through our gate and into the garden.

The water lapped right up to our doorstep, which is a few inches up off the ground level of the garden. We had procured some sandbags by this point, two of which I’d taken from a pallet behind a fence at the end of the breached river defence wall, which became a little worrying with the thousands of tons of water thundering past my ankles as I hoofed sandbags under a gap in the fence for myself and neighbours.

The water then seemed to peak. We had emergency bags packed and the cat-box ready if we’d had to leave in a hurry. All the important stuff was up off the floor. We were panicky, but had pretty much come to terms with the fact that this was going to happen and shitty river water was going to flood the house. And then it began to recede. Even though the rain still fell.

You’ll notice my neighbour’s lawn seems to miraculously escape the water. Our moss lawn was actually rather enjoying it and ended up lush and green afterwards.

We were pleased to see the waters dissipate and recede back down the street to be eventually pumped out by the council and the flood defence construction folk. Although we then discovered over four feet deep of water in the cellar.

I’m not going to get caught up in the process of blame and recrimination that is going on re: Lagan construction and their preparation and response to the flood. The weight of water coming down the river was enormous and almost unprecedented after an entire night of ceaseless torrential rain. It was always going to cause problems. Certainly the temporary defences in place to plug holes in the new flood wall weren’t satisfactory as they were easily breached along our street and along Bell and Kemp Place who were hit far worse, but weather forecasting is haruspicy and soothsaying at best (if we were to believe the reports yesterday, another flood of biblical proportions was set to come down the Water of Leith, but it barely even rained) and people have to make decisions based on such shaky advice.

We were so lucky. No water entered the main part of the house. The water in the cellar is not muddy, in fact it’s perfectly clear and continues to leak in through the walls after it’s pumped out. The level is dropping, but there is still almost a foot and a half down there today five days after the flood. Pointing out how bad other people were hit is not necessarily a comfort of course. Our own subjective experience is as stressful as it is at the time irrelevant of outside events. It’s only with hindsight that we can realise how lucky we are and think of the tragedy of others.

This post coming to you from the depths of a nasty chest infection/cold and during the worst summer on record around here causing flooding on our street and in the area. Not the part 2 I’d originally intended, but thought it was worth getting this out as I am deep inside the territory of this subject.

As I’ve already said, I believe creative blockage is a complicated recipe affecting everyone differently with differing personal reasons behind every instance. I wanted to look at some of those individual reasons in more detail. Not because I want to try and give advice or expound any self-professed wisdom. No, this is as much for myself as anyone reading this (of whom I’m sure the audience is vast…). Apart from the pleasing irony of writing about writers block, it’s a good way to confess my sins of avoidance and procrastination. And at least I can feel like I’m doing this from a slightly more privileged position with a short story in progress to the tune of 3000 words(one I’m calling ‘Love as Deep as Bones’), and another already begun.

The easy excuse. Best example I can give is the situation I’m currently in. Several days laid out with a nasty virus. Coughing so hard I’ve pulled muscles in my back and chest etc… moan, complain… and there you go, what a handy excuse to not write. It’s hard to concentrate with a fever and you can’t settle. The real test is how you deal with that. I’ve lost count of the amount of stories that have run aground on the rocks of such an easy excuse. I mean, let’s face it, it’s not really the being ill that’s causing the problem, it’s my own brain.

All it amounts to is laziness. If the task ahead seems tough then, if (like me) you’re predisposed to taking the easy way out and avoiding the hard work, latching onto an excuse of being ill is the perfect justification. You can trick yourself into thinking that it’s okay. It’s not your fault. You can’t help being ill right?

WRONG.

This is Jay Lake – http://www.jlake.com/ No doubt familiar to anyone with a toe dipped into the world of SF. He has published several novels, hundreds of short stories and edited anthologies, winning various awards. He is intricately involved in SF and writing at all levels. He has also been battling cancer for the last four years. And writing about it, along with continuing his writing career to the fullest. You can read the personal blogging he’s done about cancer here – http://jlake.com/cancer_index.html

I use this example as a source of inspiration for the sort of punishment we can take yet carry on with the things we love. So much of it comes down to the individual and how they react to situations. I’m not saying you should be ashamed for not being strong and continuing in the face of adversity – we all have our own individual battles and subjective difficulties which can seem mountainous. No, it’s more that Jay Lake’s example can show you that is IS possible to carry on and if you feel compelled to write then nothing should really stop you.

Since I started this blog entry a few days have passed and I’m still recovering from this damned chest infection. And then we’ve had all this fun with flooding (which I’ll make a separate blog entry about, but certainly forms yet another easy excuse not to be writing).

The point is, life throws us all manner of adversities and the challenge is how we deal with them. It’s all too easy to fold in the face of personal difficulty, stop writing for a few days as a result and then call that ‘writer’s block’.

So that’s today’s thought-spaghetti unravelled. Now I have a story to finish writing.

A fragmented day, never settling on anything, but buzzing round various bits and pieces like a summer-drunk wasp.

After a lazy morning in bed dreaming about scimitars and other swords, I’ve spent a good part of the day with the film I watched last night haunting my brain. It was Telstar: The Joe Meek story – an adaptation of a stage play, and despite it focusing on Meek’s developing insanity and megalomaniacal tendencies, I found it quite affecting. So today I’ve been unearthing a few old CDs with early Ritchie Blackmore recordings produced by Meek and some other great obscure British Psychedelia. It’s a shame that the film didn’t highlight a little more the groundbreaking work he did for sound recording, instead of painting the tragic, damaged side to him. That said, the performances in the film are excellent and the dramatic focus is elsewhere, but if you didn’t know who Joe Meek was and what he did for music it might not be clear why he was so revered.

With such tunes in my head, we spent an afternoon at Stockbridge market where there is so much tempting food you may just die rather than choose what to buy, or go with a lot of money in your pocket. Salami pretzels, some Bombay street food chicken curry, German cheesecake fruit pastry thing. So great to have such an amazing local market that I will be helping out there next week for Alexis Southam Jewellery on her debut appearance at the market!

And slowly my head turns toward writing. I have a document open of The Last Photograph, which seriously needs something good done with it as it still reads well for an unfinished first draft and deserves some quality time.

As an intermission, I have been reading this rather excellent list of writing advice by Pixar story artist Emma Coats, originally tweeted by her one by one, and sourced here. I’ll reproduce the list below – by no means a bible of story rules, as any writing advice always is an opinion, in this case a very interesting and probably quite valid opinion to help story creation.

#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.

#2: You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different.

#3: Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.

#4: Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.

With all of the day’s burning issues, such as dead dictators adorning our newstands next to the fashion magazines and crossword puzzle books, the main thing that troubled me this week was the news of my local fish and chip shop closing down. After 36 years of a family business, L’Aquila Bianca will no more serve its delicious fish and chips – an unhealthy comfort to me on many a Saturday night after work. You often had to wait for the fish to be fried, but I like that as it meant it was always freshly cooked, instead of sitting limply in a warmer for a couple of hours before falling into soggy pieces in your chip paper. No, L’Aquila Bianca fish was always crisply battered, hot and tasty, and the chips generously portioned, fat and fluffy – never greasy.

It all makes me marvel at what a particularly British institution the Fish and Chip shop is, and just how major a feature they are in any given community. Not that there’s a dearth of fish and chip shops in Stockbridge, Edinburgh. Another two reside within easy walking distance, and I’ve used them once or twice, but L’Aquila Bianca was always the one. It’s absence on a colourful and unique high street full of independent shops will be keenly felt, all the more so as I hear it’s likely to be replaced with a Dominos pizza (which will impact on the other local takeaways, such as the excellent Anima on Henderson Row who make superb pizzas). I fear that one day the high street will succumb entirely to chain stores and multiples and some essential character of the area will be utterly and irrevocably lost.

Although chip shops are in many ways a bit of a joke to tourists due to their ‘deep-fry anything and eat it’ appearance, they’ve been a part of this country for many many years (despite being run almost exclusively, it seems, by Italians) and I grew up eating out of them. From the small simple chippys of my childhood in Glasgow, to the ‘salt and sauce’ establishments of Edinburgh where I live now, it’s hard-wired into my taste buds that the smell of vinegar and sizzling oil make me ravenously hungry.

L’Aquila Bianca has only played a small part in my life, as I’ve lived in this area for four years now, but the significance of another small, local, family-run business that took pride in it what it did (winning awards in its heyday) closing down is great and undeniable.